


NIGHT

by jrench



Category: Smosh
Genre: M/M, Smosh Community Writing Competition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 12:02:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19150651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jrench/pseuds/jrench
Summary: Shayne is left alone for years to think about an old flame and never loses hope, although one day he loses a little bit of hope he didn't know he had.





	NIGHT

1.0

I want to fill this elegy with lights of all kinds. But his death makes me stingy. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. 

1.2  
Autopsy is a term historians use of the “eyewitnessing” of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power. to withhold this authorization is also powerful. Some historians carefully do not allege to have seen anything themselves, but introduce such information with “it is said”, as one might say _on dit_ or _dicitur_.

When he died his cats got angry, stayed angry, hissing, growling, lashing, glaring, by day and night. They went to the door, they went to window, they would not lie down. It is said someone took them to the church on the day of the funeral. Freyja goes right up to the front and raises herself to the edge of the coffin and as soon as she smells the fact, her anger stops. I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.

2.1

My mother on her death bed (three years ago now) stops, raises her finger. There’s a bos at home with all your letters don’t you want it?

she asks (hard blue stare) - astonished I fumble, didn’t know she kept them -

Where? I ask.

In the big bedroom (closing her eyes) you can have them all just one I want.

I wait.

The one he wrote you from France you know that winter the girl died

2.2

He ran away, rather than settle down and have to do something. He wandered around seeking something, and sent me postcards or a Christmas gift, no return address. He was travelling under a false passport and using other people’s names. This isn’t hard to arrange. It is irredeemable. I don’t know how he made decisions in those days. He only wrote one letter, to me, that winter the girl died.

3.1

My boyfriend dies in Ebingen in the year **XXXX,** a surprise to me.

3.3

We want other people to have a center, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here’s why. It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?

4.1

My boyfriend did not marry the girl. He married two (that I know of) other women during those years, one of whom divorced him, the other is now his widow. IT confuses me, the times overlap, what matters is they each adored him - with his hazel eyes and broken laugh- “light of my life” as his widow now says and oddly into me drops expression my mother used also. I can see her in the kitchen scraping carrots. For years after he left she would glance at me every time a car came spinning along the road.

4.2

I never got an address for him. Indeed during the last seven years of her life I wrote to him not a single word. Eventually I began to say he was dead. How do you know? She asked and I said When I pray for him nothing comes back.

4.3

After that we didn’t talk of my boyfriend. From my point of view, all desire left the world.

5.1

What he needed from me I have no idea. When I caught up to him in high school he liked me to do his homework but that wasn’t it. He called me **professor** , an epithet implying intellectual respect but we never had a conversation about our ideas in life. And when he telephoned me - out of the blue - about a half a year after my mother died he had nothing to say.

My mother is dead

**Yes I guess she is.**

We had a lot of pain because of you.

**Yes I guess she did.**

Why didn’t you write.

**Well it was hard for me.**

Are you sick.

**No.**

Do you work.

**Yes.**

Are you happy.

**No. Oh no.**

 

5.2

His voice was like his voice with something else crusted on it, black, dense - it lighted up for a moment when he said “ **professor** ” ( **So professor d’you attain wisdom yet**?) then went dark again. All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history. What is a voice?

5.3

My boyfriend’s widow tells me that when she first met him (Berlin) he was penniless. He walked into a bar and she looked up and said, That one I want to marry. They lived for two years on the street, sleeping in stairwells, eating once a week, this was after the girl, drinking a lot. Stairwell smell (I remember) him huddling in the stairwell where we kept our boots winter Sunday blood on his face he was about nineteen and my mother around him with her hands crying What now oh what now?

5.4

My boyfriend’s widow takes me to the church where the funeral was held two weeks ago, It is white and clean as an eggshell inside. I like cleanliness. My boyfriend didn’t care so much. When he came to stay with me in **XXXX** , two years before he ran away, the apartment got dirty, and at last I was glad he moved on. 

5.6

When my parents died I chose not to eat but to burn them. Then I buried the ashes under stones cut with their names. For my boyfriend I had no choice, I was a thousand miles away. His widow says he wanted t be cast in the sea, so she did this. There is no stone and did I mention he changed his name.

6.1

When my boyfriend died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn’t find a phone number for me until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with radio on, his death came wandering slowly toward me across the sea.

8.1

Because our conversations were few (he phoned me 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I’d been asked to translate them.

**Lots of crime in Berlin.**

**The Deutsche are hardworking.**

**I am painting the flat.**

**We have a dog that’s him barking.**

**Yes he barks in German.**

**Don’t go back to LA don’t go alone.**

**What will you do sit on the Santa Monica pier and look down at the graves.**

**Put the past away you have to.**

8.2

When we were children . . .

8.3

More than one person has pointed out to me a likeness between my boyfriend and Lazarus.

8.5

There is no possibility I can think my way into his muteness. God wanted to make nonsense of itself. To rob it, and I believe God has succeeded.

9.1

_Light and shadows fall past us now we are racing along, now it is evening, we pass the school, pass the lake, pass the graveyard and Santa Monica rising behind - like people sailing somewhere and there were rituals to perform at fixed places, certain times, but it broke off, we couldn’t get anything to work, again and again we gave up frustrated, threw the victims in the sea. Kept sailing._

_9.1.1_

_Love you. Love you.  
Damien_

**Author's Note:**

> I strayed a bit loosely from the prompt, but I imagine quite a lot can happen when you get on an airplane to leave from someone who sees only the best of you.


End file.
